I don't want to read your novel

Give me your takes, spare me your fiction

Whatever else you say about the man, General Augusto Pinochet liked owning books. Scattered between his various homes, his foundation and a military academy were some 50,000 he’d acquired during his life, a collection that included many rarities and was valued at about $3m.

For those feeling self-conscious about their reading habits, I should add that the Chilean dictator’s critics don’t believe he read much of his collection, owing to him being a bit of a thicky. Who would have the time anyway, when you have thousands of political opponents to torture, murder or disappear? Besides, after lockdown it’s hard to shake the feeling that most of us primarily buy shelves of books to look impressive on Zoom calls. In that respect, we are all Pinochet.

But for my purposes, what’s most interesting about this collection is how little fiction Pinochet had acquired. The general was interested in books about Napoleon, Chilean history and other political tomes, but not so much made-up stories. The one notable fiction work cited by the New York Times was actually a novel about Chilean military life, which is kind of like me reading Scoop.

Actually, Scoop is one of only a handful of fiction books that I’ve squeezed into shelves that otherwise creak with 800-page history epics and chin-stroking political tomes. For the past decade I’ve increasingly struggled to take fiction seriously. As some comedian once said (I think it was Frank Skinner), it’s tough to get past a character waking in the opening sentence of a book when you brain keeps interjecting that in fact they did not.

I don’t have this problem with TV, perhaps because the stuff I’m seeing on screen did happen, in a sense. Humans tend to believe what they see with their eyes. By contrast, there is something uniquely uncompelling about written fiction, and not just to knuckle-draggers like me. Even the historian Tom Holland, a very nice man and previous author of “Gothic horror novels about vampires”, has confessed to the same misgivings. Why bury your head in myths when there is such a wealth of experiences that actually happened.

Go read your history books then, you might say, and keep your nose out the fiction section. Oh, I would. But unfortunately men’s media habits have become a political issue. If the podcast is political, then that is both because of what Joe Rogan is saying and what he is distracting men from as he hawks dubious brain coffee. For some it is a moral crisis that we aren’t reading fiction.

According to Natalia Albin Legorreta, men’s reluctance to read fiction is “hurting all of us”, leading men to turn in on themselves, flunk education and become incels:

I’m not suggesting reading fiction will automatically make men leave behind all incel-led, selfish discourse. But I find it hard to look at the statistics of falling reading and media literacy rates in men and the rise in far-right, misogynistic ideas within communities of young men, and not relate them in any way.

Making men read more fiction would increase empathy, Legorreta argues. And most importantly, it would create more empathy for people like her! The prescribed antidote to slugs, snails and puppy-dogs tails are books heavy on vibes and light on plot, written by anybody other than a dead white male, and preferably somebody with a ‘complex’ sexual identity. Were men to read such books, we would understand others’ inner lives and be nicer to them, so the argument goes.

The evidence that men are not reading fiction is actually rather shakier than such articles suggest, even if it is true that book publishing is dominated by women. Some 71% of staff working in Canadian and American book publishing are women, according to one survey. My thoroughly unscientific glance across a recent Sunday Times fiction bestseller list revealed that eight of the hardbacks were authored by women, as well as seven of the paperbacks. But on balance, it’s probably only the case that women are reading a bit more than men in general, and are a bit likelier to read fiction.

If I were in the bookselling business I would perhaps seek to change this. Maybe I would hire more Rogan enjoyers to commission and edit books for the Pot Noodle scoffers and Call of Duty marathoners. Dare I say it, but there may be a business case for a bit of diversity, equity and inclusion in publishing, even if such initiatives have abruptly gone out of fashion.

But on an ideological basis I’m not convinced. Putting a book into somebody’s hands and expecting them to empathise with your worldview, and perhaps even at the margins change their voting habits, seems optimistic, to put it mildly. No amount of thumbing through The Bonfire of the Vanities will grant an optimist the kind of black-hearted cynicism that Tom Wolfe needed to write the novel, and no amount of Sally Rooney is going to prevent me scoffing at bookish grads absorbed in each others’ navels.

Actually, it seems likelier to go the other way. Does anybody seriously think that the average blue-haired Brightonian LGBTQ+ graphics designer is going to be more sympathetic to conservatism after reading about the exploits of Harry Flashman, “a scoundrel, a liar, a cheat, a thief, a coward – and, oh yes, a toady” who rolls around the British Empire shagging, stealing and killing? It is likelier that they would firebomb the house of the nearest Tory MP, though for a Brighton resident this would entail a bit of a hike out of town.

If the internet has proven one thing, it is surely that most of us cannot tolerate others opinions. Far from the filter bubble being the problem, the lack of boundaries between different worldviews is what’s causing all the ruckus. Just as the printing press let everybody know how many heretics were in their midst, the internet has let us read the political opinions of everyone and anyone. Not only are most of these opinions exceedingly bad, but most of you cannot tolerate them.

And ironically what underpins this is a distinct lack of empathy for the non-fiction enjoyers. We are content to leave you alone, immersed in your plotless pages of airy-fairy waffle. We simply ask that you afford us the same courtesy, as we amble into a comfortable middle-age reliving the Battle of Arnhem for the 37th time.